


That Which is Sainted

by willowbilly



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anxiety, Developing Relationship, Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Hurts, F/M, Goodsir is Best Sir, Pining, Timeline What Timeline, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day Fluff, and wrote this in ONE SITTING, arts and crafts, bc they're in love, i wasn't gonna write anything for valentine's day but then i remembered THESE TWO
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-28 16:56:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17791211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: Goodsir makes Lady Silence a card for Valentine's Day.





	That Which is Sainted

Goodsir initially believes that he is sneaky about it. He has never had cause to make a Valentine's Day card for anyone, for he had never met anyone as special as Lady Silence before, so it is his first and therefore very flawed attempt. But he must do this. For her. For everyone— every man who treasures a woman and who considers her special and deserving of flattery, who is overwhelmed by the magnitude of kind, honest words which fight to escape every time that he is so fortunate and blessed as to be in her presence— gives a card.

Since there are no cards to be purchased here, out on the ice, Goodsir sets about crafting one himself.

During one of their shared language sessions he surreptitiously sketches the Lady's profile on a fresh sheet of parchment, the loose leaf tucked into the top of his notebook. They are facing each other, him kneeling primly upon the floor, opposite where she is sitting comfortably cross-legged, the space so small that their knees are almost touching. He must take care not to allow his gaze to linger upon the angle of her legs where they are splayed out in their foreign trousers of tough but butter-soft caribou hide.

Even with the thick insulating bulk of her soft-soled seal-fur boots (her winter _kamiit,_ _kamik_ being the singular form, and _kamiit,_ as he has come to understand, being the plural), her feet are smaller than his. Goodsir wishes that he had one of his family's frayed-soft quilts to tuck over her lap, or a flat cushion which he could slide beneath her feet, so that they may rest in low exaltation off of the cold, hard, and altogether undeserving deck.

Really he wants to fuss and fawn over her and wait upon her hand and foot, but he is careful not to touch her at all, not even by glancing accident. He is careful not even to gaze too long upon her face, lest she catch him at it and find him overbearing. Or, worse: lest she be afraid of him. He would rather excise his beating heart from his breast with his surgeon's scalpel and his own two bare hands than he would purposely scare her.

The Lady has suffered far too much of imperial English overbearance already.

But, well. Goodsir looks at her face much more while attempting to capture its lovely shape upon paltry paper. He is constantly looking at her and then quickly and guiltily avoiding her when she tries to catch his eyes with hers, and his distraction could likely not be more apparent.

At one point she leans over to see what he is doing with the aid of his scattered concentration and his very best charcoal pencil and Goodsir snaps his journal shut in a panic, his posture jerking swiftly upright as if to attention before a superior officer, and he stutters a feeble half-apology at his own odd behavior, only remembering to haltingly repeat himself in his broken Inuktitut after he has already blurted out the sentiment too fast in English.

Lady Silence has a particular and particularly steady way of looking at him which he thinks may perhaps only partially be due to the manners of her culture. She habitually inclines her head and watches from beneath her brows, a posture easily suited to either closed-off suspicion or private amusement. Right now it is both, as she is confused by Goodsir's emphatic reaction, but there is a twitch denoting laughter at the corner of her beautiful mouth, and the wrinkle of her brow smooths into a teasing quirk almost within the very same second.

She does not lean back out of his space but instead scoots nearer and props herself against him, nestling shoulder-to-shoulder. She is shorter, so her cheek ends up upon him, the weight of her head cradled precious upon Goodsir's body. Goodsir is so ecstatic that he almost ceases to breathe lest he jostle her, and his terrified rigidity melts like a snowbank thawing beneath the golden fullness of spring sunlight.

He picks up the book on marine organisms which they have been going over and they pore over it together, her head against him, a stray strand of her fine jet hair tickling his chin. They point at each letter and word, sounding it out and discussing the contents and structure as they go, and somehow their hands keep brushing.

When she captures his hand in hers, putting them palm-to-palm and interlacing her fingers with his, he is so happy that he thinks he may expire and ascend to heaven right there and then.

Goodsir is artistically inclined enough that his naturalist's diagrams garner praise for their clarity and delicate linework. He turns this talent to the task of assembling Lady Silence's Valentine's card, finishing her portrait by memory and then fastidiously cutting it out and affixing it to the center of a stiffer cardstock.

Beneath her picture he layers some colorful dried specimens. They're spare pressed flowers, for the most part small blue and yellow things with petals no larger than grains of rice and a few slim, long blades of chartreuse grass, all of which he'd collected from the southerner tundra earlier on in their expedition. He assembles these into a collage, making the backdrop to her silhouette the mural of a bouquet, and he draws an intricately patterned Oriental vase, the likes of which he'd once seen behind glass in the cabinet of a rich man's house, to “hold” it all. He painstakingly draws a decorative geometric border of Celtic knotwork and garnishes the corners with glittery accents of scrap foil and the deep red jewel-drips of sealing wax and then he must take a moment to rest his eyes and sigh in satisfaction at the pleasingly aesthetic and cheerful results of his own work.

On impulse, he adds a disembodied pair of peregrine falcon wings folded into the streamlined configuration of a hunting stoop to either side of the bouquet, filling in the twinned patches of blank space which had resided there. He sharpens his colored pencils to ensure that every pinion is rendered crisp and accurate.

He hums a tune to himself as he labors and is generally so very aflutter with nerves of goodwill and anticipation that not even Stanley's thinly veiled disdain or the fact that his charcoal picture of the Lady is a little smudged can bring him down.

Goodsir paces around and hesitates for a long time before he goes through with writing anything on the card.

In the end he makes the message very, very small, practically hiding the words at the bottom within a loop of illustrated satin ribbon, and he only dares to include the endearment at all because he is fairly confident that Lady Silence is not yet literate enough to read what it says.

On Valentine's Day itself Goodsir is queasy with anxiety. He tells himself that there is no cause for dread, as he is only, at worst, going to be giving a small and arguably meaningless gift to a friend, but when he sees Lady Silence's smile as she first greets him, the blood rushes to his head so quickly that he fears he may faint dead away.

Blushing profusely, wanting to get it over with so that his shame may be as painlessly little as possible, Goodsir removes the card from where he was holding it like a schoolboy behind his back and timidly, shrinkingly, proffers it.

His hands are clumsy in his fingerless gloves, and he is dismayed beyond reason to find that he has therefore bent one of the corners during transport. His hands shake as he presents the imperfect thing, and his eyes prickle with tears, for the card is transformed into something small and ugly, now. Something garish and wholly unworthy of her in his sight.

“A. A Valentine's Day card,” he says. “For you. It's, a. A present.”

She stares at the card for what feels like an eternity, her mouth parted slack in flabbergasted lack of comprehension. She cocks her head but does not raise her chin as she finally looks up at him. She looks up at him from beneath her gently lifted eyebrows, as always, and there is a spark of something either sorrowful or yearning in her gracile eyes. She shuts her mouth and her brows draw together.

“You needn't accept,” Goodsir rushes to say, and naturally he ends up prattling on. “Presents are, well. They're more for the giver, I suppose, and you don't owe anyone here anything, so of course you need not take it, should you... if you don't want it, or if it offends you, in some way.”

He wants to tell her that, in fact, _he_ owes _her_ something; he owes her _everything,_ merely for the privilege of knowing her. He manages to keep that part choked down behind his teeth.

Her lip quivers, and with a surge of horror he realizes that there are tears welling in her eyes.

“Oh no,” he says, but before he can say anything else Lady Silence has taken the card from his hands and has pressed the paper flat to her chest, over her heart. She smiles as the tears streak down her cheeks, and she is radiant with it. She is _glowing_ with joy as the opaque glass panes of a lantern glows with flame. She could light up the deepest dark with her smile.

“You like it?” he asks, tremulously, foolishly disbelieving every bit of evidence before him, and she nods.

“Oh, good,” Goodsir says, and he is so relieved that the sentence which he'd written on the card slips free unhindered from his mouth. “I love you.”

He freezes.

Lady Silence reads him as easily as he might read one of his own beloved books. She sets the card down with tender reverence on the shelf along with all her other trinkets and tributes, sweeping them carelessly to the side to make room. Then, very slowly, she takes him into her arms and tucks her face against his neck, her breath furling out gentle against his unevenly whiskered throat, her nose nuzzled in against his pulse.

“I love you so very much, and. And I'm glad that you like it,” says Goodsir, by which he means that he is glad that she likes _him,_ and he folds his trembling arms around her, and he holds her very close.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Owed in part to my skimming this article and getting Inspired: http://fiveminutehistory.com/valentines-day-in-the-victorian-era/


End file.
